White House sees '04 growth over 4%

Card defends Iraq policy after criticism from Gingrich

CorbettB. Daly

WASHINGTON (CBS.MW) -- President Bush believes the economy's growth next year will top 4 percent, White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card said Sunday.

"We are going to find next year's growth to be in the neighborhood of 4 percent, 4.4 percent," Card said in a television interview with Fox News Sunday.

The Commerce Department last month reported the economy grew at a 20-year high 8.2 percent in the third quarter of this year. Economists polled by CBS MarketWatch expect the growth rate to be at 4 percent in both the fourth quarter of this year and the first three months of next year.

On Friday, the Labor Department reported that the unemployment rate fell to 5.9 percent as the economy created 57,000 jobs in November, significantly lower than the 140,000 increase predicted by economists polled by CBS MarketWatch. See full story.

Asked when the economy would begin to create 200,000 jobs per month, the figure economists see as critical to bring the unemployment rate down significantly, Card said "I actually think we are poised for more significant growth and the economists are predicting that next year we will have significant (job) growth as compared to the last year."

Asked if the administration would be able to create 2 million jobs needed by next November to erase the net loss of jobs during Bush's term, Card said: "we will do everything we can to try to get there."

Steel tariffs

Card defended the Bush administration's recent decision to scrap its controversial steel tariffs, arguing that the domestic steel industry had been granted sufficient time "to catch its breath, make some changes."

"There is no doubt that the value of the steel industry in America has actually increased over the past several months and so I think that means that the people who are investing in the steel industry are demonstrating more confidence in it than maybe the steel workers are," Card said.

Leo Gerard, head of the United Steelworkers of America, called the decision to abandon the tariffs slightly more than halfway through their three-year term "clear evidence of capitulating to European blackmail and a sorry betrayal of American steelworkers and their communities."

Europe and Japan forced Bush's hand by threatening to retaliate as soon as Dec. 15 for the tariffs, which were ruled illegal by the Geneva-based World Trade Organization.

The WTO last month confirmed an earlier ruling against the U.S. tariffs, first imposed in March 2002, and set the stage for retaliatory tariffs on more than $2.2 billion worth of U.S. exports.

Gingrich challenges Iraq approach

Bush's top White House aide defended the administration's efforts to rebuild Iraq as criticism came from an unlikely source -- former speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich.

Gingrich says the administration has been putting too much emphasis on the military activity in Iraq at the expense of a political solution. The leader of the Republican revolution of the mid-1990s told Newsweek magazine in its Dec. 15 issue released Sunday the administration went "off a cliff in Iraq."

"I think the cliff we have gone off that we need to get back on is to put the Iraqis at the center of this equation, not foreign governments, not the U.N., not more American troops. Put the Iraqis at the center of this equation and recognize that most Iraqis do not want to go back to a brutal, murdering, raping dictatorship," Gingrich said Sunday on NBC's Meet the Press.

"The White House has to get a grip on this," Gingrich added, "I went public this weekend because this is a very serious problem."

On the CBS News program Face the Nation, Card scoffed at the former speaker's suggestions.

"Newt Gingrich is not all-knowing," Card said, adding "things are going better than they could have been expected to go at this time, and we're making great progress."

Card pledged that the United States would not cut and run from Iraq.

"We would like to see the Iraqi people have more opportunities for self-government, but we're going to stay there until the job is done," Card said.

Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., who went to Baghdad with Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., a day after Bush made his secret Thanksgiving visit, charged Monday that the administration is making decisions based on the timetable for the U.S. presidential election next November.

"It is clear that there is some concern that the process in Iraq for elections is being driven not by the conditions on the ground in Iraq but by the timetable for our own elections," Clinton said Monday.

Asked about the comments on NBC's Meet the Press, Clinton said Sunday she heard "on the ground" during her visit to Iraq that "there is concern about that," referring to the election timetable criticism.

"I never thought I'd be agreeing with Newt Gingrich on these issues, but the administration has not been willing to make midcourse corrections or listen except what they recently did with this moving up the timetable on sovereignty," Clinton said Sunday.

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